THIRTY-FIVE

For ninety-two years, eight months, and twenty-six days, since the last bus had driven up the mountain, the souls of First Colony had lived in this manner:

Under the lights.

Under the One Law.

According to custom.

According to instinct.

In the day-to-day.

With only themselves, and those they had made, for company.

Under the protection of the Watch.

Under the authority of the Household.

Without the Army.

Without memory.

Without the world.

Without the stars.

For Auntie, alone in her house in the glade, the night—the Night of Blades and Stars—commenced like so many nights before it: she was sitting at the table in her steam-fogged kitchen, writing in her book. That afternoon she had taken a batch of pages off the line, stiff with the sun—they always felt to her like squares of captured sunlight—and had passed the remainder of the daylight hours preparing them: trimming the edge on her cutting board, opening the binding and its covers of stretched lambskin, carefully undoing the stitching that held the pages in place, taking up her needle and thread to sew the new ones in. It was slow work, satisfying in the way of all things that required time and concentration, and by the time she was finished, the lights were coming on.

Funny how everyone thought she had just the one book.

The volume she was writing in, by her closest recollection, was the twenty-seventh of its kind. It seemed she was always opening a drawer or stacking cups in a cabinet or sweeping under the bed and coming across another one. She supposed that was the reason she put them away like she did, here and there, not in a neat line on some shelf to look at. Whenever she found one, it felt like bumping into an old friend.

Most told the same stories. Stories she remembered of the world and how it was. Time to time a bit of something would sail out of the blue, a memory she’d forgotten she had, like television, and the silly things she used to watch (its flickering blue-green glow and her daddy’s voice: Ida, turn that damn thing off, don’t you know it rots your brain?); or something would set her off, the way a ray of sunshine drizzled over a leaf or a breeze with a certain smell in its currents, and the feelings would start to move through her, ghosts of the past. A day in a park in autumn and a fountain billowing water and the way the afternoon light seemed to catch in its spray, like a huge sparkling flower; her friend Sharise, the girl from down the corner, sitting beside her on a step to show her a tooth she’d lost, holding it with its bloody stump in her palm for Auntie to see. (Ain’t no such thing as the tooth fairy, I know it, but she always brings me a dollar.) Her mama folding laundry in the kitchen, wearing her favorite summer dress of pale green, and the puff of scent from the towel she was snapping and folding against her chest. When this happened, Auntie knew it would be a good night of writing, memories opening into other memories, like a hall of doors her mind could walk down, keeping her busy till the morning sun was rising in the windows.

But not tonight, thought Auntie, dipping the nib of her pen into the cup of ink and smoothing the page flat beneath her hand. Tonight was not a night for these old things. It was Peter she meant to write on. She expected he’d be along directly, this boy with the stars inside him.

Things came to her in their way. She supposed it was because she’d lived so long, like she was a book herself and the book was made of years. She remembered the night Prudence Jaxon had appeared at her door. The woman was sick with the cancer, well on her way, much before her time. Standing there in Auntie’s door with the box pressed to her chest, so brittle and thin it was like she could blow away in the wind. Auntie had seen it so many times in her life, this bad thing in the bones, and there was never any right thing to do except to listen and do like the person asked, and that was what Auntie did for Prudence Jaxon that night. She took the box and kept it safe, and it wasn’t but a month before Prudence Jaxon was dead.

He has to come to it on his own. Those were the words Prudence had said to Auntie, true words; for it was the way of all things. The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch. Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and comfortable and full of people smiling at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain’t you pretty, ain’t you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreamy softness of your seat and sipped ginger ale from a can and watched the world float in magical silence past your window, the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autumn light and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy was waving from his bicycle, and then the woods and fields and a single cow eating grass.

But Peter, she thought; it wasn’t the train but Peter she had meant to write on. (Only where had they been going? Auntie wondered. Where had they taken a train to that one time, the two of them together, she and her daddy, Monroe Jaxon? They had been going to visit her gramma and cousins, Auntie remembered, in a place he called Downsouth.) Peter, and the train. Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sometimes it was the other, not easy; the things of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on. Your old life ended and the train took you away to another, and the next thing you knew you were standing in the dust with helicopters and soldiers all around, and all you had to remember folks by was the picture you found in the pocket of your coat, the one your mama, who you would never see again in all the days of your life, had slipped in there when she’d hugged you at the door.

By the time Auntie heard the knock, the screen opening and slapping as the person who’d come calling let themselves in, she’d almost stopped her stupid old crying. She’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t do it anymore. Ida, she’d said to herself, no more crying over things you can’t do nothing about. But here she was, all these years gone by, and still she could work herself into such a state whenever she thought about her mama, tucking that picture in her pocket, knowing that by the time Ida found it, the two of them would be dead.

“Auntie?”

She’d expected it would be Peter, come with his questions about the girl, but it wasn’t. She didn’t recognize the face, floating in the fog of her vision. A squished-up narrow man’s face, like he’d gotten it jammed in a door.

“It’s Jimmy, Auntie. Jimmy Molyneau.”

Jimmy Molyneau? That didn’t seem right. Wasn’t Jimmy Molyneau dead?

“Auntie, you’re crying.”

“Course I’m crying. Got something in my eye is all.”

He slid into the chair across from her. Now that she had found the right pair of glasses from the lanyards around her neck, she saw that he was, as he claimed, a Molyneau. That nose: it was a Molyneau nose.

“What you want then? You come about the Walker?”

“You know about her, Auntie?”

“Runner came by this morning. Said they found a girl.”

She couldn’t say for sure what all he wanted. There was something sad about him, defeated seeming. Usually Auntie would have welcomed a bit of company, but as the silence continued, this strange, sullen man she only vaguely recalled sitting across from her with a hangdog look on his face, she began to feel impatient. Folks shouldn’t just come barging into a place with nothing on their minds.

“I don’t really know why I came by. There was something I think I was supposed to tell you.” He sighed heavily, rubbing a hand over his face. “I really should be on the Wall, you know.”

“You say so.”

“Yeah, well. That’s where the First Captain should be, right? On the Wall?” He wasn’t looking at her; he was looking at his hands. He shook his head in a way that seemed like maybe the Wall was the last place on earth he wanted to be. “It’s something, huh? Me, First Captain.”

Auntie had nothing to say to that. Whatever was on this man’s mind, it had nothing to do with her. There were times when you couldn’t fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.

“You think I could have a cup of tea, Auntie?”

“You want, I make you one.”

“If it’s no trouble.”

It was, but there seemed no escaping it. She rose and put the kettle on to boil. All the while the man, Jimmy Molyneau, sat silently at the table, looking at his hands. When the water began to thrum in its kettle she poured it through the strainer into a pair of cups and carried it back.

“Careful. It hot now.”

He took a cautious sip. He seemed to have lost all interest in talking. Which was fine by her, all things considered. Folks came in time to time to talk about a problem, private things, probably thinking since she lived alone like she did and saw almost no one that she’d have nobody to tell. Usually it was women, come to talk about their husbands, but not always. Maybe this Jimmy Molyneau had a problem with his wife.

“You know what people say about your tea, Auntie?” He was frowning into his cup, like the answer he was looking for might be floating in there.

“What’s that now?”

“That it’s the reason you’ve lived so long.”

More minutes passed, a weighty silence pressing down. At last he took a final sip of tea, grimacing at the taste, and returned it to the table.

“Thanks, Auntie.” He climbed wearily to his feet. “I guess I better be going. It’s been nice talking to you.”

“Ain’t no bother.”

He paused at the door, one hand poised on the frame. “It’s Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy Molyneau.”

“I know who you are.”

“Just in case,” he said. “In case anybody asks.”

The events that began with Jimmy’s visit to Auntie’s house were destined to be misremembered, beginning with the name. The Night of Blades and Stars was, in fact, three separate nights, with a pair of days between. But as with all such occurrences—those destined to be recounted not only in the immediate aftermath but for many years to come—time seemed compressed; it is a common error of memory to impose upon such events the coherence of a concentrated narrative, beginning with the assignment of a specific interval of time. That season. That year. The Night of Blades and Stars.

The error was compounded by the fact that the events of the night of the sixty-fifth of summer, from which the rest descended, unfolded in a series of discrete compartments with overlapping chronologies, no single piece being wholly aware of the others. Things were happening everywhere. For instance: while Old Chou was rising from the bed he shared with his young wife, Constance, propelled by a mysterious urge to go to the Storehouse, across the Colony, Walter Fisher was thinking the same thing. But the fact that he was too drunk to get out of bed and lace his boots would delay his visit to the Storehouse, and his discovery of what lay there, by twenty-four hours. What these two men had in common was that they had both seen the girl, the Girl from Nowhere, when the Household had visited the Infirmary at first light; but it was also true that not everyone who had encountered her firsthand experienced this reaction. Dana Curtis, for instance, was wholly unaffected, as was Michael Fisher. The girl herself was not a source but a conduit, a way for a certain feeling—a feeling of lost souls—to enter the minds of the most susceptible parties, and there were some, like Alicia, who would never be affected at all. This was not true of Sara Fisher and Peter Jaxon, who had experienced their own versions of the girl’s power. But in each case, their encounters had taken a more benign, if still troubling form: a moment of communion with their beloved dead.

First Captain Jimmy Molyneau, lurking in the shadows outside his house at the edge of the glade—he had yet to appear on the catwalk, a cause of considerable confusion for the Watch, leading to the hasty deputizing of Sanjay’s nephew Ian as First Captain pro tem—was trying to decide whether or not to go to the Lighthouse, kill whomever he found there, and turn the lights off. Though the impulse to perform such a grave and final act had been building in him all day, it was not until he had gazed into his teacup in Auntie’s steam-fogged kitchen that the idea had crystallized into a specific shape in his mind, and if anyone had happened upon him standing there and asked what he was doing, he wouldn’t have known what to say. He could not have explained this desire, which seemed both to originate from some deep place within him and yet not be entirely his own. Sleeping inside the house were his daughters, Alice and Avery, and his wife, Karen. There were times in the course of his marriage, whole years, when Jimmy had not loved Karen as he should have (he was secretly in love with Soo Ramirez), but he had never doubted her love for him, which seemed boundless and unwavering, finding its physical expression in their two girls, who looked exactly like her. Alice was eleven, Avery nine. In the presence of their gentle eyes and tender, heart-shaped faces and sweetly melancholy dispositions—they were both known to burst into tears at the slightest provocation—Jimmy had always felt a reassuring force of historical continuum and, when the black feelings came, as they sometimes did, a tide of darkness that felt like drowning from within, it was always the thought of his daughters that would lift him from his gloom.

And yet the longer he stood there, skulking in the shadows, the more his impulse to douse the lights seemed wholly unrelated to, and hence beyond the reach of, the idea of his sleeping family. He felt strange within himself, very strange, as if his vision were collapsing. He stepped away from his house and by the time he reached the base of the Wall, he knew what he had to do. He felt an overwhelming relief, soothing as a bath of water, as he ascended the ladder, which connected with Firing Platform Nine. Firing Platform Nine was known as the odd-man post; because of its location above the cutout, an irregularity in the shape of the Wall to accommodate the power trunk, it was not visible from either of the adjacent platforms. It was the worst duty, the loneliest duty, and this was where Jimmy knew Soo Ramirez would be tonight.

Though her emotions had yet to consolidate into anything more specific than a nameless dread, Soo as well had been feeling troubled all night. But these feelings, of something vaguely not right, were diffused by other, more personal recriminations: the array of disappointments brought about by being asked to step down as First Captain. As Soo had discovered in the hours since the inquest, this was not an entirely unwelcome development—the responsibilities had begun to take their toll—and she would’ve had to step down eventually. But getting herself fired was hardly the way she wanted to do it. She’d gone straight home and sat in her kitchen and cried for a good two hours. Forty-three years old, nothing ahead of her but nights on the catwalk and the odd dutiful meal with Cort, who meant well enough but who’d run out of things to say to her about a thousand years ago; the Watch was all she had. Cort was in the stables like always, and for a minute or two she wished he was at home, though it was just as well he wasn’t, since he probably would have just stood there with that helpless look on his face, not moving to comfort her, such gestures being completely beyond his powers of expression. (Three dead babies inside her—three!—and he’d never known what to say even then. But that was years ago.)

She had no one to blame but herself. That was the worst part about it. Those stupid books! Soo had come across them at Share, idly sifting through the bins where Walter kept the stuff nobody wanted. It was all because of those stupid books! Because once she’d cracked the binding on the first one—she’d actually sat down on the floor to read, folding her legs under her like a Little in circle—she’d felt herself being sucked down into it, like water down a drain. (“Why, if it isn’t Mr. Talbot Carver,” exclaimed Charlene DeFleur, descending the stairs in her long rustling ball gown, her eyes wide in an expression of frank alarm at the sight of the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in the hallway in his dusty riding breeches, the fabric smoothly taut against his virile form. “What ever could you intend, coming here while my father is away?”) Belle of the Ball by Jordana Mixon; The Passionate Press, Irvington, New York, 2014. There was a picture of the author inside the back cover: a smiling woman with flowing handfuls of dark hair, reclining on a bed of lacy pillows. Her arms and throat were bare; atop her head was perched a peculiar, disklike hat—a hat not large enough even to keep the rain off.

By the time Walter Fisher had appeared by the bin, Soo had read to chapter three; the sound of his voice was so intrusive, so alien to her experience of the words on the pages, that she actually jumped. Anything good? Walter asked, his eyebrows lifting inquisitively. You seem pretty interested. Seeing as it’s you, Walter went on, I can let you have the whole box for an eighth. Soo should have bargained, that’s what you did with Walter Fisher, the price was never the price; but in her heart she’d already bought them. Okay, she said, and hoisted the box off the floor. You’ve got yourself a deal.

The Lieutenant’s Lover, Daughter of the South, The Hostage Bride, A Lady at Last: never in all her life had Soo read anything like these books. Whenever Soo imagined the Time Before, the thought was synonymous with machines—cars and engines and televisions and kitchen stoves and other things of metal and wire she had seen in Banning but did not know the purpose of. She supposed it had also been a world of people, too, all kinds of people, going about their business in the day-to-day. But because these people were gone, leaving behind only the ruined machines they had made, the machines were what she thought of. And yet the world she found between the covers of these books did not appear so very different from her own. The people rode horses and heated their homes with wood and lit their rooms with candlelight, and this material sameness had surprised her, while also opening her mind to the stories, which were happy stories of love. There was sex, too, lots of sex, and it wasn’t at all like the sex she knew with Cort. It was fiery and passionate, and sometimes she found herself wanting to hurry through the pages to get to one of these scenes, though she didn’t; she wanted to make it last.

She never should have brought one to the Wall that night, the night the girl had appeared. That was her big mistake. Soo hadn’t meant to, not really; she’d been carrying the book around in her pouch all day, hoping for a free minute, and had forgotten it was there. Well, maybe not forgotten, not exactly; but certainly it hadn’t been Soo’s intention, as things had occurred, that she should decide to make a quick visit to the Armory—where, alone in the quiet with no one to see her, she had pulled it out and started to read. The book she’d brought was Belle of the Ball (she’d read them all and started over), and encountering its opening passages for the second time—the impetuous Charlene descending the stairs to find the arrogant and mutton-whiskered Talbot Carver, her father’s rival, whom she loved but also hated—Soo found herself instantly reliving the pleasures of her first discovery, a feeling magnified by the knowledge that Charlene and Talbot, after much hemming and hawing, would find each other in the end. That was the best thing about the stories in the books: they always ended well.

These were Soo’s thoughts when, twenty-four hours later, busted from First Captain, Belle of the Ball still stashed in her pouch (why couldn’t she just leave the damn thing at home?), she heard footsteps ascending behind her and turned to see Jimmy Molyneau climbing off the ladder onto Firing Platform Nine. Of course it would be Jimmy. Probably he had come to gloat, or apologize, or some awkward combination of the two. Though he was hardly one to talk, Soo thought bitterly, not showing up at First Bell.

Jimmy? she said. Where the hell have you been?

· · ·

The night was inhabited by dreams. In the houses and barracks, in the Sanctuary and Infirmary, dreams moved through the dozing souls of First Colony, alighting here and there, like wafting spirits.

Some, like Sanjay Patal, had a secret dream, one they’d been having all their lives. Sometimes they were aware of this dream and sometimes they were not; the dream was like an underground river, constantly flowing, that might from time to time rise to the surface, briefly washing their daylight hours with its presence, as if they were walking in two worlds at the same time. Some dreamed of a woman in her kitchen, breathing smoke. Others, like the Colonel, dreamed of a girl, alone in the dark. Some of these dreams became nightmares—what Sanjay did not remember, had never remembered, was the part of the dream that involved the knife—and sometimes the dream wasn’t like a dream at all; it was more real than reality itself, it sent the dreamer stumbling helplessly into the night.

Where did they come from? What were they made of? Were they dreams or were they something more—intimations of a hidden reality, an invisible plane of existence that revealed itself only at night? Why did they feel like memories, and not just memories—someone else’s memories? And why, on this night, did the entire population of First Colony seem to lapse into this dreamer’s world?

In the Sanctuary, one of the three J’s, Little Jane Ramirez, daughter of Belle and Rey Ramirez—the same Rey Ramirez who, having found himself suddenly and terrifyingly alone at the power station, and troubled by dark urges he could neither contain nor express, was, at that moment, cooking himself to a crisp on the electrified fence—was dreaming of a bear. Jane had just turned four years old. The bears she knew were the ones in books and in stories Teacher told—large, mild creatures of the forest whose hairy bulk and gentle faces were the seat of a benign animal wisdom—and that was true of the bear in her dream, at least at the beginning. Jane had never seen an actual bear, but she had seen a viral. She was among the Littles of the Sanctuary who had actually beheld the viral Arlo Wilson with her own eyes. She had been rising from her cot, which was positioned in the last row, farthest from the door—she was thirsty and had meant to ask Teacher for a cup of water—when he had burst through the window in a great shattering of glass and metal and wood, landing practically on top of her. She had thought at first it was a man, because it seemed like a man, with a man’s displacement and presence. But he wasn’t wearing any clothes, and there was something different about him, especially his eyes and mouth, and the way he seemed to glow. He was looking at her in a sad way—his sadness seemed suggestively bearlike—and Jane was about to ask him what was wrong and why he glowed like that when she heard a cry behind her and turned to see Teacher racing toward them. She passed over Jane like a cloud, the blade she kept hidden in a sheath beneath her billowing skirt clutched in her outstretched hand, one arm raised over her head to bring it down upon him like a hammer. The next part Jane did not see—she had dropped to the floor and begun to scramble away—but she heard a soft cry and a ripping sound and the thud of something falling. This was followed by more yelling—“Over here!” someone was saying, “look over here!”—and then more screams and shouts and a general commotion of grown-ups, of mothers and fathers coming in and out, and the next thing Jane knew she was being pulled from under her cot and whisked with all the other Littles up the stairs by a woman who was crying. (Only later did she realize that this woman was her mother.)

Nobody had explained these confusing events, nor had Jane told anyone what she’d seen. Teacher was nowhere around; some of the Littles—Fanny Chou and Bowow Greenberg and Bart Fisher—were whispering that she was dead. But Jane didn’t think she was. To be dead was to lie down and sleep forever, and the woman whose airborne leap she had witnessed did not seem even slightly tired. Just the opposite: at that moment, Teacher had seemed wondrously, powerfully alive, animated by a grace and strength that Jane had never experienced—that even now, a whole night later, excited and embarrassed her. Hers was a compact existence of compact movements, a place of order and safety and quiet routine. There were the usual squabbles and hurt feelings, and days when Teacher seemed cross from beginning to end, but in general the world Jane knew was bathed in an essential mildness. Teacher was the source of this feeling; it radiated from her person in a blush of maternal warmth, as the rays of the sun heated the air and earth; but now, in the perplexing aftermath of the night’s events, Jane sensed she had glimpsed something secret about this woman who had so selflessly cared for all of them.

That was when it had occurred to Jane that the thing she’d seen was love. It could be nothing less than the force of love that had lifted Teacher into the air, into the waiting arms of the glowing bear-man, whose light was the radiance of royalty. He was a bear-prince who had come to take her away to his castle in the forest. So perhaps that was where Teacher had gone off to now, and why all the Littles had been moved upstairs: to wait for her. When she returned to them, her rightful identity as a queen of the forest revealed, they would be brought back downstairs to the Big Room, to welcome and celebrate her with a grand party.

These were the stories Jane was telling herself as she fell asleep in a room with fifteen other sleeping Littles, all dreaming their various dreams. In Jane’s dream, which commenced as a rewriting of the prior night’s events, she was jumping up and down on her bed in the Big Room when she saw the bear come in. He did not enter through the window this time but through the door, which seemed small and far away, and he was different than he’d been the night before, fat and woolly like the bears in books, lumbering his wise and friendly way toward her on all fours. When he reached the foot of Jane’s bed he sat on his haunches and gradually drew himself upright, revealing the downy carpet of his great smooth tummy, his immense bear head and damp bear eyes and huge, paddled hands. It was a wonderful thing to see, strange and yet expected, like a present Jane had always believed would arrive, and her four-year-old’s heart was moved to a rush of admiration for this great noble being. He stood in this manner a moment, taking her in with a thoughtful expression, then said to Jane, who had continued her happy bouncing, addressing her in the rich, masculine tone of his woodland home, Hello, Little Jane. I’m Mister Bear. I have come to eat you up.

This came out as funny—Jane felt a tickling in her stomach that was the beginning of a laugh—but the bear did not react, and as the moment elongated, she noticed there were other aspects to his person, disturbing aspects: his claws, which emerged in white curves from his mittlike paws; his wide and powerful jaws; his eyes, which did not seem friendly or wise anymore but dark with unknowable intention. Where were the other Littles? Why was Jane alone in the Big Room? But she wasn’t alone; Teacher was in the dream now also, standing beside the bed. She looked as she always looked, though there was something vague about the features of her face, as if she were wearing a mask of gauzy fabric. Come on now, Jane, urged Teacher. He’s already eaten all the other Littles. Be good and stop that jumping so Mister Bear can eat you up. I—don’t—want—to, Jane replied, still bouncing, for she did not want to be eaten—a request that seemed more silly than frightening, but even so. I—don’t—want—to. I mean it, warned Teacher, her voice rising. I am asking you nicely, Little Jane. I am going to count to three. I—don’t—want—to, Jane repeated, applying the greatest possible vigor to her defiant bouncing. I—don’t—want—to. Do you see? said Teacher, turning to the bear, who had continued his upright vigil at the foot of the cot. She raised her pale arms in exasperation. Do you see now? This is what I have to put up with, all day long. It’s enough to make a person lose her mind. Okay, Jane, she said, if that’s how you’re going to be. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Which was when the dream took its last, sinister turn into the realm of nightmare. Teacher had seized Jane by the wrists, forcing her down onto the bed. Up close, Jane saw that a piece of Teacher’s neck was missing, like a bite snatched from an apple, and there were thready things hanging there, a collection of dangling strips and tubes, wet and glistening and gross. Only then did Jane understand that all the other Littles had indeed been eaten, just as Teacher had said; they’d all been eaten by Mister Bear, bite by bite by bite, though he wasn’t Mister Bear anymore, he was the glowing man. I don’t want this, Jane was screaming, I don’t want this! But she had no strength to resist, and she watched in helpless terror as first her foot and then her ankle and then the whole of her leg were swallowed into the dark cave of his mouth.

The dreams bespoke a range of concerns, influences, tastes. There were as many dreams as there were dreamers. Gloria Patal dreamed of a massive swarm of bees, covering her body. Part of her understood these bees to be symbolic; each bee that crawled upon her flesh was a worry she had carried in her life. Small worries, like whether or not it would rain on a day when she had planned to work outside, or whether or not Mimi, Raj’s widow, her only real friend, was angry with her on a day when she had failed to visit; but larger worries, too. Worries about Sanjay, and about Mausami. The worry that the pain in her lower back and the cough that sometimes woke her at night were harbingers of something worse. Included in this catalog of apprehensions were the worried love she had felt for each of the babies she had failed to carry to term, and the knot of dread that tightened inside her each night at Evening Bell, and the more generalized worry that she—that all of them—might just as well be dead already, for all the chance they had. Because you couldn’t not think about it; you did your best to carry on (that’s what Gloria had told her daughter when she’d announced her intentions to marry Galen, crying all the while over Theo Jaxon; you had to carry on), but the facts were the facts: someday those lights were going out. So perhaps the greatest worry of all was that one day you would realize that all the worries of your life amounted to one thing: the desire to just stop worrying.

That’s what the bees were, they were worries large and small, and in the dream they were moving all over her, her arms and legs and face and eyes, even inside her ears. The setting of the dream was contiguous with Gloria’s last moment of consciousness; having tried without success to rouse her husband, and having fended off the inquires of Jimmy and Ian and Ben and the others who had come to seek his counsel—the matter of the boy Caleb had yet to be determined—Gloria had, against her better instincts, dozed off at the table of her kitchen, her head rocked back, her mouth hanging open, soft snores issuing from deep within her sinuses. This was all true in the dream—the sound of her snoring was the sound of the bees—with the singular addition of the swarm, which had, for reasons that were not entirely clear, entered the kitchen to settle in a single mass upon her, like a great quivering blanket. It seemed obvious now that this was the sort of thing bees did; why had she failed to protect herself against this eventuality? Gloria could feel the prickling scrape of their tiny feet on her skin, the buzzing flutter of their wings. To move, she knew, even to breathe, would arouse them into a lethal fury of simultaneous stinging. In this condition of excruciating stasis she remained—it was a dream of not moving—and when she heard the sound of Sanjay’s footsteps descending the stairs, and felt his presence in the room, followed by his wordless departure and the slap of the screen door as he stepped from the house, Gloria’s mind lit up with a silent scream that launched her into consciousness while also erasing any memory of what had happened: she awakened having forgotten not only about the bees, but about Sanjay.

On the other side of the Colony, lying on his cot in a cloud of his own smell, the man known as Elton, a lifelong fantasist of splendidly ornate and erotic flights, was having a good dream. This dream—the hay dream—was Elton’s favorite, because it was true, taken from life. Though Michael did not believe him—and, really, Elton had to admit, why would he?—there had been a time, many years ago, when Elton, a man of twenty, had enjoyed the favors of an unknown woman who had chosen him, or so it appeared, because his blindness guaranteed his silence. If he didn’t know who this woman was—and she never spoke to him—he couldn’t say anything, which implied that she was married. Perhaps she wanted a child with a man who wasn’t able, or had simply wished for something else in her life. (In self-pitying moments, Elton wondered if she’d done it on a dare.) It didn’t really matter; he welcomed these visits, which always came at night. Sometimes he would simply awaken into the experience, its distinctive sensations, as if the reality had been called forth out of a dream, to which it would then return, fueling the empty nights to come; on other occasions the woman would come to him, take him silently by the hand, and lead him elsewhere. This was the circumstance of the hay dream, which unfolded in the barn, surrounded by the whinnying of horses and the sweet dry smell of grass, lately cut from the field. The woman did not speak; the only sounds she made were the sounds of love; and it ended much too quickly, with a final shuddering exhalation and a mound of hair brushing over his cheeks as the woman released herself, rising wordlessly away. He always dreamed these events just as they’d occurred, in all their tactile contours, up to the moment when, lying alone on the floor of the barn, wishing only to have seen the woman, or even just to have heard her speak his name, he tasted salt on his lips and knew that he was crying.

But not tonight. Tonight, just as it was ending, she bent to his face and whispered into his ear:

“Somebody’s in the Lighthouse, Elton.”

In the Infirmary, Sara Fisher was not dreaming, but the girl appeared to be. Sitting on one of the empty cots, feeling brightly, almost painfully awake, Sara watched the girl’s eyes flickering behind her lids, as if darting over an unseen landscape. Sara had pretty much convinced Dale to keep his mouth shut, promising that she would tell the Household in the morning; for now the girl needed sleep. As if to support this claim, that was precisely what the girl had done, curling on the cot in that self-protective way she had, while Sara watched her, wondering what the thing in her neck had been, what Michael would find, and why, looking at the girl, Sara believed she was dreaming about snow.

There were others, quite a few, who were not sleeping either. The night was alive with wakeful souls. Galen Strauss, for one: standing at his post on the north wall—Firing Platform Ten—squinting into the pooling glow of the lights, Galen was telling himself, for the hundredth time that day, that he wasn’t a complete fool. The need to say this—he had actually caught himself muttering the words under his breath—meant of course he was. Even he knew that. He was a fool. He was a fool because he’d believed he could make Mausami love him, as he loved her; he was a fool because he’d married her when everyone knew she was in love with Theo Jaxon; he was a fool because when she’d told him about the baby, spouting her stupid lie about how many months it was, he’d swallowed his pride and plastered an idiotic smile on his face, saying only: A baby. Wow. How about that.

He’d known damn well whose baby it was. One of the wrenches, Finn Darrell, had told Galen about that night down at the station. Finn had gotten up to take a leak and, hearing a noise from one of the storage rooms, had gone to check it out. The door was closed, Finn explained, but you didn’t have to open it to know what was happening on the other side. Finn was the kind of guy who took a little too much pleasure from giving you news he thought you needed to hear; from the way he told the story, Galen guessed he’d stood outside the door a lot longer than he needed to. Jeez, Finn said, she always make noises like that?

Fucking Finn Darrell. Fucking Theo Jaxon.

And yet, for a hopeful moment, Galen had entertained the notion that maybe a baby would make things better between them. A dumb idea, but still he’d thought it. But of course the baby only made them fight more. If Theo had returned from that ride down the mountain, probably they would have told him right then; Galen could pretty much imagine the scene. We’re sorry, Galen. We should have told you. It just kind of … happened. Humiliating, but at least it would have been over by now. The way things stood, he and Maus would have to live with this lie between them forever. Probably they’d end up despising each other, if they didn’t despise each other already.

He was thinking these things while also dreading the morning to come, when he was supposed to ride down to the station. The order had come from Ian, though Galen had the feeling it wasn’t his idea, that it came from somewhere else—Jimmy, probably, or maybe Sanjay. He could take a runner with him, but that was all; they couldn’t spare the hands. Box it up and wait for the next relief crew, Ian had said, three days tops. Okay, Galen? You can handle this? And of course he’d said he could, no problem. He’d even felt a little flattered. But as the hours passed, he’d found himself regretting his quick compliance. He’d been off the mountain only a few times before, and it was awful—all those empty buildings and slims cooking in their cars—but that wasn’t the worst of it, not really. The problem was that Galen was afraid. He was afraid all the time now, more and more as the days went by and the world around him continued its slow, hazy dissolving. People didn’t really know how bad his eyesight was, not even Maus. They knew, but they didn’t really know, not the full extent, and every day it seemed to be getting worse. As things stood, his field of vision had shrunk to less than two meters; everything beyond that quickly faded into a gassy blankness, all lurching shapes and formless colors and halos of light. He’d tried a variety of eyeglasses from the Storehouse, but nothing seemed to help; all he’d gotten for his troubles were headaches that felt like someone sticking a blade into his temple, so he had long since stopped trying. He was pretty good with voices and could generally aim his face in the right direction, but he missed a lot of things, and he knew this made him seem slow and stupid, which he wasn’t. He was just going blind.

Now here he was, a Second Captain of the Watch, riding down the mountain in the morning to secure the station. A trip that, considering what had happened to Zander and Arlo, pretty much felt like suicide to Galen Strauss. He was hoping he’d have a chance to talk to Jimmy about it, maybe make him see some sense, but so far, the guy had not shown up.

And, come to think of it, where was Jimmy? Soo was out there someplace, and Dana Curtis; with Arlo and Theo gone, and Alicia off the Watch for good, Dana had come out of the pits to guard the Wall like everybody else. Galen got along with Dana, and the fact that she was Household now, he reasoned, might give her some sway with Jimmy. Maybe the two of them should talk about this whole go-down-to-the-station thing. Soo was on Nine, Dana on Eight. If he was quick about it, Galen could be back to his post in a matter of just a few minutes. And in point of fact, wasn’t that sound he was hearing—a sound of voices nearby, though noises traveled well at night—wasn’t that Soo Ramirez? And wasn’t the other voice Jimmy’s? If Galen could round up Dana too, might it be just a matter of a few right words to get Jimmy to see a little sense? Maybe get Soo or Dana to say, Well, sure, I can go down to the station, I don’t see why Galen should be the one?

Just a couple of minutes, Galen thought and, taking up his cross, he began to make his way down the catwalk.

At the same time, hidden away in the old FEMA trailer, Peter and Alicia were playing hands of go-to. With just the light of the spots to see by, the game had an unfocused quality, but both had long since stopped caring who won, if they’d ever cared in the first place. Peter was trying to decide what he should tell Alicia about what had happened in the Infirmary, the voice he’d heard in his mind, but with each passing minute it became more difficult to imagine actually doing this, how he might explain himself. He’d heard words in his head. His mother missed him. I must be dreaming, he told himself, and when Alicia broke his train of thought with an impatient lift of her cards, he only shook his head. It’s nothing, he told her. Play your hand.

Also awake at that hour, half-plus-one on the log of the Watch, was Sam Chou. Sam longed for nothing so much as the comfort of his bed and his wife’s affectionate arms around him. But with Sandy bedding down in the Sanctuary—she had volunteered to take over for April until someone else could be found—he had suffered a disruption to these customary rhythms, leaving him staring at the ceiling. He was also troubled by a feeling that, as the day had moved into night, he had recognized as embarrassment. That funny business at the lockup: he couldn’t quite explain it. In the heat of the moment, he’d honestly believed that something had to be done. But in the intervening hours, and after a trip to the Sanctuary to visit with his children—who seemed none the worse for wear—Sam had discovered that his feelings about the whole Caleb situation had moderated substantially. Caleb was, after all, just a kid, and Sam could now see how putting the boy out would solve very little. He felt a little guilty about manipulating Belle the way he had—with Rey down at the station, the woman was probably out of her mind with worry—and though there was certainly no love lost between him and Alicia, who was too full of herself by half, Sam had to admit that under the circumstances, with that fool Milo egging him on, it was a good thing she’d been there. Who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t. When Sam had spoken to Milo later, following up on the day’s conversations, most of which had presupposed that if the Household didn’t do anything they would take it upon themselves to put the poor kid out, and suggested that maybe they should rethink the situation, see how things looked tomorrow after a good night’s rest, Milo had responded with a look of unconcealed relief. Okay, sure, said Milo Darrell. Maybe you’re right. Let’s see how we feel in the morning.

So Sam was feeling a little bad now about the whole thing, bad and a little confounded, because it wasn’t like him to get so angry. It wasn’t like him at all. For a second there, outside the lockup, he really had believed it: somebody had to pay. It didn’t seem to matter that it was just a defenseless kid who probably thought someone on the catwalk had told him to open the gate. And the most extraordinary thing, really, was that in all that time, Sam hadn’t given much or even any thought to the girl, the Walker, who was the reason the whole thing had happened in the first place. Watching the lights of the spots playing on the eaves above his face, Sam wondered why this should be. My God, he thought, after all these years, a Walker. And not just a Walker—a young girl. Sam wasn’t one of those people who believed the Army was still coming—you’d have to be pretty stupid to think so after all these years—but a girl like that, it meant something. It meant somebody was still alive out there. Maybe a whole lot of somebodies. And when Sam considered this, he found himself strangely … uncomfortable with the idea. He couldn’t say quite why that was, except that the notion of this girl, this Girl from Nowhere, felt like a piece that didn’t fit. And what if all these somebodies just showed up out of the blue? What if she was the beginning of a whole new wave of Walkers, seeking safety under the lights? There was only so much food and fuel to go around. Sure, back in the early days it had probably seemed too cruel to turn the Walkers away. But wasn’t the situation a little different now? So many years gone by? Things having achieved a kind of balance? Because the fact was, Sam Chou liked his life. He wasn’t one of the worriers, the fretters, the keepers of bad thoughts. He knew people like that—Milo, for one—and he didn’t see the sense in it. Awful things could happen, sure, but that was always true, and in the meantime, he had his bed and his house and his wife and his children, they had food to eat and clothes to wear and the lights to keep them safe, and wasn’t that enough? The more Sam thought about it, the more it seemed that it wasn’t Caleb that something needed to be done about. It was the girl. So maybe in the morning, that’s what he’d say to Milo. Something needs to be done about this Girl from Nowhere.

Also awake was Michael Fisher. In the main, Michael viewed sleep as a waste of time. It was just another case of the body’s unreasonable demands upon the mind, and his dreams, when he cared to remember them, all seemed to be lightly retooled versions of his waking state—full of circuits and breakers and relays, a thousand problems to be solved, and he would awaken feeling less restored than rudely shot forward in time, with no discernible accomplishments to show for these lost hours.

But that was not the case tonight. Tonight, Michael Fisher was as awake as he’d ever been in his life. The contents of the chip, having disgorged itself into the mainframe—a veritable flood of data—was nothing less than a rewriting of the world. It was this new understanding that had inspired the risk Michael was now taking, running an antenna up to the top of the Wall. He’d started on the roof of the Lighthouse, connecting a twenty-meter spool of eight-gauge uninsulated copper wire to the antenna they’d stuffed up the chimney, months ago. Two more spools had gotten him to the base of the Wall. That was it for the copper he could spare. For the remainder he had decided to use an insulated high-voltage cable he would have to strip by hand. The trick now would be getting it up to the top of the Wall without being seen by the Watch. Having retrieved two more spools from the shed, he stood in the pocket of shadow underneath one of the supporting struts, weighing his options. The closest ladder, twenty meters to his left, led straight up to Platform Nine; there was no way he could climb this unnoticed. There was a second ladder situated midway between Platforms Eight and Seven, which would be ideal—except for the runners, who sometimes used it as a shortcut between Seven and Ten, it had very little traffic—but he didn’t have enough cable to reach that far.

That left only one option. Take a spool up the far ladder, move down the catwalk until he was suspended over the cutout, anchor the end of the wire, drop it to the ground below, and descend once more to connect the second wire to the first. All without anyone seeing him.

Michael knelt in the dirt, removed his wire cutters from the old canvas rucksack he used as a toolbag, and set to work, pulling the cable from its spool and stripping the plastic conduit away. At the same time he was listening for the clanging footsteps above his head that would signify a runner going through. By the time the wire was stripped and spooled back up, he’d heard the runners move through twice; he was reasonably certain he’d have a few minutes before the next one came. Depositing everything into the rucksack, he hurried to the ladder, took a deep breath, and began to ascend.

Heights had always been a problem for Michael—he didn’t like so much as standing on a chair—a fact that, in his determined state, he had failed to figure in his calculations, and by the time he reached the top of the ladder, an ascent of twenty meters that felt like ten times that many, he was beginning to doubt the wisdom of the entire enterprise. His heart was galloping with panic; his limbs had turned to gelatin. Getting down the catwalk, an open grate suspended above a maw of space, would mandate every ounce of will he possessed. His eyes had begun to sting with sweat as he pulled himself up from the final rung, sliding belly-first onto the grate. Under the glare of the lights, and without the customary reference points of ground and sky to orient him, everything seemed larger and closer, possessing a bulging vividness. But at least no one had noticed him. He cautiously lifted his face: a hundred meters to his left, Platform Eight appeared to be empty, no Watcher on station. Why that should be, Michael didn’t know, but he took it as an encouraging sign. If he acted quickly, he could be back in the Lighthouse before anyone was the wiser.

He began to move down the catwalk, and by the time he was in position, he had begun to feel better—a lot better. His fear had receded, replaced by an invigorated sense of possibility. This was going to work. Platform Eight was still empty; whoever was supposed to be there would probably catch hell, but its vacancy gave Michael the opening he needed. He knelt on the catwalk and pulled the coil of wire from his rucksack. Constructed of a titanium alloy, the catwalk would make a serviceable conductor in its own right, adding its attractive electromagnetic properties to the wire’s; in essence, Michael was turning the whole perimeter into a giant antenna. He used a wrench to loosen one of the bolts that attached the catwalk’s decking to its frame, curled the stripped wire into the gap, and tightened down the bolt. Then he dropped the spool to the ground below, listening for the soft thud of its impact.

Amy, he thought. Who would have thought the Girl from Nowhere would have a name like Amy?

What Michael didn’t know was that Firing Platform Eight was empty because the Watcher on station, Dana Curtis, First Family and Household, was already lying dead at the base of the Wall. Jimmy had killed her right after he’d killed Soo Ramirez. Whom he honestly hadn’t meant to kill; he’d only wanted to tell her something. Goodbye? I’m sorry? I always loved you? But one thing had led to another in the strangely inevitable manner of that night, the Night of Blades and Stars, and now all three of them were gone.

Galen Strauss, approaching from the opposite direction, witnessed these events as if through the fat end of a telescope: a distant splash of color and movement, far beyond the range of his vision. If it had been anybody else on Platform Ten that night, someone whose eyesight was more robust, who was not going blind from acute glaucoma as Galen Strauss was, a clearer picture of events might have emerged. As it was, what occurred on Firing Platform Nine would never be known by anyone except those directly involved; and even they did not understand it.

What happened was this:

The Watcher Soo Ramirez, her thoughts still bobbing in the currents of Belle of the Ball and, in particular, a scene set in a moving coach during a thunderstorm so vividly rendered that she could practically recall it word for word (As the heavens opened, Talbot seized Charlene in his powerful arms, his mouth falling on hers with a searing force, his fingers finding the silken curve of her breast, waves of ardor roiling through her ….), turned to see Jimmy hoisting himself onto the platform; and her first impression, punching through her feelings of conflicted irritation (she resented the interruption; he was late) was that something wasn’t right. He doesn’t look like himself, she thought. This isn’t the Jimmy I know. He stood a moment, his body oddly slack, his eyes squinting with perplexity into the lights; he looked like a man who had come to make an announcement, only to have forgotten his lines. Soo thought maybe she knew what this unspoken declaration was—she’d had a feeling for some time that Jimmy considered the two of them as more than friends—and under different circumstances, she might have been glad to hear this from him. But not now. Not tonight, on Firing Platform Nine.

“It’s her eyes,” he said faintly; he seemed to be speaking to himself. “At least I thought it was her eyes.”

Soo stepped toward him. His face was turned away, as if he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. “Jimmy? Whose eyes?”

But he didn’t answer her. One hand reached down to the hem of his jersey and proceeded to tug at it, like a nervous boy fumbling with his clothes. “Can’t you feel it, Soo?”

“Jimmy, what are you talking about?”

He had begun to blink. Fat, jeweled tears were spilling down his cheeks. “They’re all so fucking sad.”

Something was happening to him, Soo knew, something bad. In a burst of motion he yanked his jersey over his head and flung it over the edge of the platform. His chest was glazed with sweat that shone in the lights.

“It’s these clothes,” he growled. “I can’t stand these clothes.”

She’d left her cross resting against the rampart. She turned to reach for it but she’d waited too long, Jimmy had her from behind, his hands were sliding under her arms, wrapping the back of her neck, and with a sudden twisting motion something snapped at the base of her throat; and just like that her body was gone, her body had drifted away, her body was no more. She tried to cry out but no sound came; flecks of light were drifting in her vision, like shards of silver. (Oh Talbot, Charlene moaned as he moved against her, his manhood a sweet invasion she could no longer deny, oh Talbot yes, let us end this absurd game … ) She was aware that someone else was coming toward her; she heard a sound of footsteps on the catwalk where she now lay helpless; and then the shot of a cross and muffled, breathy cry. She was in the air now, Jimmy was lifting her up; he was going to throw her over the Wall. She wished she’d lived a different life, but this was the one she had, she didn’t want to leave it yet, and then she was falling, down and down and down.

She was still alive when she hit the ground. Time had slowed, reversed, started again. The spots were shining in her eyes; in her mouth, a taste of blood. Above her she saw Jimmy standing at the edge of the nets, naked and gleaming, and then he, too, was gone.

And in the last instant before all thought left her, she heard the voice of the runner Kip Darrell crying from the rampart high above: “Sign, we have sign! Holy shit, they’re everywhere!”

But he spoke these words into the darkness. The lights had all gone out.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 597